TOXIC PARENTS — when love becomes a quiet burden

In Toxic Parents, Kim Su-in crafts an emotionally restrained yet piercing exploration of familial expectations and inherited grief. The film unfolds with a delicate patience, gradually peeling back the emotional layers of its characters, revealing how love, control, and resentment coexist within the same intimate spaces. What lingers most is its portrayal of parental affection that suffocates rather than shelters, and the lasting scars left by expectations that can never quite be fulfilled. The characters’ lives are intricately intertwined, bound by a shared sense of loss that quietly reverberates from one generation to the next. Though the English title slightly diminishes the film’s original subtlety, the storytelling remains deeply affecting. Toxic Parents leaves an indelible aftertaste — a haunting reflection on the fragile threads that hold families together, and the painful truth that love, when distorted, can wound as deeply as it heals.